U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes has rejected a Department of Justice attempt to remove her from a case over tree-cutting at East Potomac Golf Links, denying the recusal demand in a 13-page opinion late Sunday before pressing forward with an evidentiary hearing Monday.
Judge Reyes kicked off a nearly four-hour hearing Monday with almost 20 minutes of full-throated opening remarks directed at the government’s attorneys, saying she felt betrayed by the tree cutting.
She pronounced herself “furious” and “beyond disappointed,” plus called the administration’s arguments “frustrating,” “preposterous” and “totally beyond the pale.”
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The Justice Department says her self-acknowledged fury means she is no longer able to be objective.
“Judge Reyes’ histrionics in prior hearings have clearly demonstrated she is no longer impartial,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. wrote in the motion Friday night.
Mr. Woodward asked the court to release the audio of the hearing so the public could hear how angry the judge got. The federal district court in Washington prohibits outsiders from recording proceedings, though a public line was available for people to listen live.
Judge Reyes has asked the D.C. Preservation League and two local residents, Mr. Trump’s opponents in the case, to respond to the recusal demand by Sunday.
That is a day before she is slated to take testimony from Jessica Bowron, acting director of the National Park Service, and Gregory Wischer, deputy chief of staff at the Interior Department.
Judge Reyes has signaled that she believes they were acting at Mr. Trump’s behest when they ordered the axing of more than 400 trees on Oct. 11.
Park Service officials said the cutting has nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s plans for the golf course.
Those officials said it was part of a 7-year-old plan to restore the course to its original vision of open vistas, rather than the crowded parkland setting it has become in the past century.
They also defended the timing, saying the Park Service had crews that became available after working on other projects over the summer and into the early autumn.
Judge Reyes was not buying it.
“The court concludes, on this limited record, that government officials raced to undertake the [tree management plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign, and not because of some newfound zeal to implement a small part of a seven-year-old [plan],” she wrote.
The judge’s self-acknowledged fury at the Trump administration stems from her feeling of betrayal.
She said she had repeatedly given the government the benefit of the doubt over the past months, brushing aside anti-Trump litigants’ demands that she issue orders barring any major changes at the golf course while the case proceeded. She had said she trusted the government to follow her directives not to ask, and so she did not feel a formal order was needed.
The Justice Department has made similar strikes against other judges, trying to boot them from cases or raise ethics complaints against them.
Those have largely been unsuccessful, though one in Georgia, Judge Eleanor Ross, did recuse herself from a case on the Justice Department’s request.
She had been revealed to have attended a victory party for Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who unsuccessfully pursued a criminal case against Mr. Trump over his attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
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